Vampire Weekend Recording Second LP

Same band, new tricks.

The kings of the Upper West Side are back! Well, they're working on being back, at least. Basically: Vampire Weekend are currently in a Brooklyn studio toiling away at their sophomore LP, according to an Entertainment Weekly report. The guys are tentatively hoping for a September release.

Singer Ezra Koenig told EW that the foursome are more or less done with the songwriting for the LP, and are now sculpting its sound. Cue vague "what will it sound like?" quote: "It's definitely going to be a recognizably Vampire Weekend sound, but there are going to be new sounds. We're trying to challenge ourselves not to use the same bag of tricks that we used on the first album-- different instruments, stuff like that." Keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij is once again producing the album. Read the full story here.

In other Vampire Weekend news, the group are playing a special one-off charity gig at Intramural Field at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina tonight as part of the ONE campaign's Campus Challenge, which helps fight poverty. Also, it looks like we might finally get an album from Batmanglij's R&B-tinged side project Discovery with Ra Ra Riot singer Wes Miles at some point this year. In the meantime, there are some (awesome) Discovery tracks streaming on their MySpace, some of which have been around for about a year.